This application claims benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 2002-238580 filed on Aug. 19, 2002, the contents of which are incorporated by reference.
The present invention relates to portable telephone sets and, more particularly, portable telephone sets capable of automatically or semi-automatically inputting various data thereto.
Recent portable telephone sets have a function of collectively inputting data from a personal computer as a registering means, in which destination data of a telephone diary or the like are registered. Also, portable telephone sets are in a multiple function trend, and some portable telephone sets have an image input function such as an electronic camera for inputting image data so as to permit appropriately transmission of the image data to the opposite side of communication or the like.
Regarding a communication network (such as PHS), which is constituted by a center device and portable telephone sets connected to the network, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-236179 discloses a portable telephone set, to which a scanner for reading out letters or the like printed on a name card can be connected for transmitting image data of letters or the like read out by the scanner to the center device. The center device recognizes the image data, converts the same to letter/numeral data and transmits the converted data to a pertinent portable telephone set or the like. The pertinent portable telephone set registers the received letter/numeral data in the own data base.
The prior art portable telephone set is arranged to be capable of collectively reading out data from a personal computer or the like in a telephone diary or the like. In this case, however, this reading operation should be performed after starting the personal computer to edit files thereon. This function is convenient when registering a great deal of data at one time, but is extremely cumbersome when newly adding individual data. New additional data are often obtained by the name card or papers on which these data are written. These data are inputted through the key operations for each item in the telephone diary with watching these data. This operation, however, take a relatively lot of labor, thus posing a problem that it is difficult to make ready on-site registration. Besides, names or the like are often for unique reading, and sometimes “kana” input for conversion to Chinese characters at the time of the registration is different from “furigana”, and subsequent editing of the furigana item is time-consuming. Furthermore, at present direct exchange of preserved data between terminals is impossible, and it is inevitable to use mails for the data exchange. This means that communication via the base station is necessary whenever data is exchanged.
In the portable telephone set disclosed in the above laid-open publication, image data is transmitted to the center device for requesting image recognition, and the portable telephone set itself need not have any letter recognizing function. However, even by making direct letter recognition of the image data, it is difficult to select data to be registered. Also, it is necessary to make communication via the base station or the like for registration of each data.